Joaquin Castro leading effort to increase backing for pre-K

Bill Lambrecht, San Antonio Express-News

Published
11:17 am CDT, Monday, May 9, 2016

Buses and parents drop off their children Friday May 6, 2016 at the Pre-K 4 SA South Education Center. This facility is one of four education centers around the city. Rep. Joaquin Castro is trying to take the concept of Pre-K for SA to a national level. less

Buses and parents drop off their children Friday May 6, 2016 at the Pre-K 4 SA South Education Center. This facility is one of four education centers around the city. Rep. Joaquin Castro is trying to take the ... more

Photo: Julysa Sosa/ For The San Antonio Express-News

Photo: Julysa Sosa/ For The San Antonio Express-News

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Buses and parents drop off their children Friday May 6, 2016 at the Pre-K 4 SA South Education Center. This facility is one of four education centers around the city. Rep. Joaquin Castro is trying to take the concept of Pre-K for SA to a national level. less

Buses and parents drop off their children Friday May 6, 2016 at the Pre-K 4 SA South Education Center. This facility is one of four education centers around the city. Rep. Joaquin Castro is trying to take the ... more

Photo: Julysa Sosa/ For The San Antonio Express-News

Joaquin Castro leading effort to increase backing for pre-K

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WASHINGTON — With Elmo and Cookie Monster in his corner, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro is hoping to boost support for pre-kindergarten programs across the country with a bipartisan caucus that draws on San Antonio’s experiences with childhood learning.

Castro, D-San Antonio, is spearheading the new Congressional Pre-K Caucus at a time when states and localities are struggling to fund pre-K programs and skepticism still exists.

A conservative website captured concerns about pre-K’s government intrusion: “Joaquin Castro turns brother Julian’s Pre-K for SA into “Pre-K for USA,” read the headline on a story about legislation.

The jab alluded to former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro’s 2012 initiative and resulting sales tax increase that ushered in the city’s Pre-K 4 SA, with the goal of full-day programs for over 22,000 4-year-olds in eight years. He’s now the Housing and Urban Development secretary in Washington.

Joaquin Castro hopes that universal pre-K warning turns into truth.

The House has some 400 caucuses dealing with a host of matters, from boating and baseball to rodeos. There’s even a Congressional Bourbon Caucus. Most meet rarely and few can point to tangible achievement.

In a gridlocked House, where minority Democrats have little hope for new initiatives, Castro understands the unlikely fate of a separate bill he introduced boosting federal pre-K funding by $750 million.

But he hopes for wording in other bills that can expand enrollment and give localities more pipelines into federal pots of money.

He intends for his caucus to operate on Capitol Hill and beyond, much as he did with the U.S.-Japan Congressional Caucus he co-founded three years ago. That caucus, which has grown to more than 70 members, has hosted Japanese leaders and was instrumental in Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to San Antonio in February.

At the Congressional Pre-K Caucus formal announcement last month, Sesame Street characters pranced into an ornate hearing, delighting and frightening preschoolers. Now that the fun is over, Castro is laying plans to turn the caucus into a pre-K rallying point in Congress and take the issue on the road.

In his second term, Castro says he wants to build on his work in the higher education realm while he was in the Texas Legislature.

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of people already lost by the time they get to high school years,” he said in an interview.

“The fact is that, by that point in people’s lives, a lot of students are already off track. Unless we start people strong early, as my brother did with Pre-K 4 SA, then by the time they get to the 11th or 12th grade, they lack the educational foundation they need to make it to college. Too many high school students still need so much remedial help.”

A handful of Republicans among the 29 caucus members boosts chances for success. While some GOP governors across the country have embraced pre-K, House Republicans have a general aversion to anything that smacks of big-government spending.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the fourth-ranking GOP leader in the House, is one of four Pre-K Caucus co-chairs. Oklahoma, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic president in more than 60 years, is a leader in pre-K thanks in part to the presence of the George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa. The state ranks fourth in the nation in access to early learning.

Cole, who heads the Appropriations subcommittee that handles education, said he believes that the caucus has strong potential.

“You look for the things that can bring people together. This is one of those things,” he said.

Pre-K crusaders

Early reviews are positive.

Sarah Rittling, president of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group in Washington, said the caucus “really is a good way of showing in an impactful way that there is bipartisan support for pre-K.”

In Southern California, Celia Ayala, the daughter of self-educated immigrants, is CEO of Los Angeles Universal Pre-School, with an enrollment of 11,000 children.

Funding is all-important, she said, but so is the message that underpins it. For that reason, she believes that what Castro and the Pre-K Caucus preach will be heard.

“What it says is that there is a bipartisan group of our leadership in Washington, D.C., that believes that early education is a priority, and that sends a strong message across the country,” she said.

Ayala observed that the Castros are gaining a reputation as pre-K crusaders.

“They benefited from a mother who believed in making sure that her boys got a solid foundation in terms of their schooling and their achievements. And now they’re giving back,” she said.

Her Los Angeles County organization, like most others, is fighting for money. Money from a tobacco tax supporting pre-K has steadily declined and will run out next month.

In Kentucky, the state’s new GOP governor, Matt Bevin, cited “tight fiscal times” last month in vetoing a $40 million initiative enabling more pre-K participation by children in families of modest means.

The Arkansas Better Chance program for early childhood education was boosted early on by a beer tax. Last month, a legislative committee turned down a $10 million infusion despite supporters’ arguments that pre-K yields more high school graduates and ultimately reduces crime.

In Denver, a report this year found wide disparities in pre-K enrollment between low-income and richer parts of the city.

Colorado, one of four states with legalized recreational marijuana, took in $135 million in taxes and license fees last year from nearly $1 billion in sales of pot. That revenue landed in the state’s general fund, adding $24 million for schools.

But in Denver, school officials took the unusual step last month of putting up an animated video disputing the notion that marijuana legalization has helped significantly. The school board plans to vote next month on whether to put a tax increase on the November ballot.

In Texas, despite San Antonio’s apparent success, the report card is decidedly mixed. The state fares poorly in key federal grant competition. Texas was not among the 18 states winning portions of $250 million in the Education Department’s Pre-School Development Grant competition. Texas did not submit a proposal for the $1 billion in the federal Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge for early learning programs.

Texas landed in the top 10 states (ninth) for access to pre-K in ratings a year ago by the National Institute of Early Education Research. But the state ranked 29th of 41 states with programs in state spending per child and met only two of the institute’s 10 benchmarks for quality, often lacking limits on class size and student-teacher ratio. New ratings are expected shortly.

Commitments tested

On May 3, proclaimed by the White House as National Teacher Appreciation Day, the administration trumpeted pre-K successes since President Barack Obama took office in 2009: $750 million for new and better preschools and 100,000 additional children with pre-K access.

Yet across the country, commitments are being tested.

Libby Doggett, who began her career as a first-grade teacher in Austin, is the U.S. Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and early learning.

In an interview, she praised progress around the country — in states that include Oklahoma, Virginia and Vermont, and in several major cities, San Antonio among them.

“The research is so very clear that children are learning,” said Doggett, wife of U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-San Antonio.

“They’re like sponges. There’s so much more brain development in the first five years than in any time in their life. But we just have not responded quickly enough. Together, we need to make the services work better. But there’s just not enough money.”

A Vanderbilt University study last fall cast doubt on grand claims of pre-K dividends. After following 1,000 Tennessee children from pre-K to third grade, researchers concluded that as far as math and literacy, those not in preschool had caught up to those with early training.

The study gave fodder to skeptics. But it drew howls of criticism from pre-K supporters who attacked its methods and brought out other research pointed to better-rounded, higher-earning adults from high-quality early education.

Closing the local gap

In San Antonio, supporters of Pre-K 4 SA already are compiling evidence they may need to continue the one-eighth-cent sales tax that supports it. Voters will reconsider the program in 2020.

The program, now in its third year, has received more than $30 million annually from the tax and next year is projected to serve around 4,000 children at four city centers and elsewhere.

Last month, Pre-K 4 SA for the first time awarded competitive grants, $4.2 million that will expand many half-day programs to full-day and infuse programs with new features and innovations. For instance, teachers are being trained in conflict resolution; how, for instance, to best shape 4-year-olds in the battling over a toy.

Kathy Bruck, CEO of Pre-K 4 SA, said the program is yielding measurable results. When compared with a national sample made up of a similar cross-section of children, San Antonio scored higher in cognitive skills, literacy and math and closed the gap in language skills, she said.